How the War on Gay Marriage Turned Into a War on Adoption

I have been married for 28 years. I met my wife in my freshman year of college. We started dating in my second semester, and have been so exclusive that we celebrate the anniversary of our first kiss rather than our wedding day. We met in our late teens; we are now in our mid-50s, and continue, with high hearts, the lifetime project of enduring the certainty of temporary hardship in order to keep alive the possibility of sustained joy. Though not regular churchgoers, we believe in marriage the way others believe in God, as something worthy of faith, commitment and sacrifice — indeed, as a provision that God has made for the happiness of all his mortal creatures. We have never thought of our marriage as anything but pleasing to anyone who cared to judge it, and have never imagined that the sanctity of our marriage might threaten the sanctity of other marriages, not to mention the institution of marriage itself.

Until now.

What has changed our understanding of the way some people see our marriage is, of course, the general debate unleashed by the last two days of argument before the Supreme Court on the subject of same-sex marriage. No, my wife and I are not of the same sex; I am a man and she is a woman. But we are infertile. We did not procreate. For the past nine years, we have been the adoptive parents of our daughter; we are legally her mother and father, but not biologically, and since Tuesday have been surprised and saddened to be reminded that for a sizable minority of the American public our lack of biological capacity makes all the difference — and dooms our marriage and our family to second-class status.

Like many Americans, I have had what a politician might call an "evolving position" on the issue of marriage equality. For a long time, I thought that "domestic partnerships" would suffice as a kind of parallel institution to the institution of holy matrimony — marriage in all but name; marriage for those who were otherwise not entitled to marry. Of course, it was the totality of that last phrase — a phrase that so confidently assumes who is entitled to what — that led me to examine my beliefs. Why were gay people not entitled to marry? Why did they not enjoy the same rights that my wife and I did? I was open to hearing arguments from those willing to justify such extreme and eternal stricture, as long as they did not originate in a rote recitation of scripture. But I never heard any that made sense. For a long time I was told that same-sex marriages somehow endangered my own, but like anyone who has ever been married, I understood that whatever threat there was to my marriage came from within rather than from without. I was not the only one to reject out of hand the logical fallacy of what might be called the "zero sum" defense of traditional marriage, and before long I started hearing an argument based on biology or, as groups such as the National Organization for Marriage would have it, "nature." For all its philosophical window dressing — for all its invocation of natural law, teleological destiny, and the "complementary" nature of man and woman — this argument ultimately rested on a schoolyard-level obsession with private parts, and with what did, or did not, "fit." There was "natural marriage" and "unnatural" marriage, and it was easy to tell the difference between them by how many children they produced. A natural marriage not only produced children; it existed for the purpose of producing children. An unnatural marriage not only failed to produce children; it resorted to procuring children through unnatural means, from artificial insemination to surrogacy to, yes, adoption. The argument against same-sex marriage now boiled down to a kind of biological determinism, and so became almost indistinguishable from an argument against adoption itself.

I first became aware of the contempt that "pro-marriage" forces had for my own enduring union and for my own adoptive family last year, when I attended a conservative conference and accepted a pamphlet published by an adjunct to the National Organization for Marriage called "The Ruth Institute." Entitled "77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage," the pamphlet offered a list what it called "incontrovertible statements in support of Natural Marriage", most of which extolled the bond between children and their biological parents and decried the consequences of its ever being broken. Now, as an adoptive parent, I am well aware of the importance of biology, and believe that a child's connection to his or her biological family should be preserved whenever possible. But the National Organization for Marriage pamphlet stunned me for not for its recognition of the biological bond between parents and children but rather for its suggestion that all families built outside that bond were the result of unseemly adult machinations — and so "inverted the purpose of marriage." Indeed, its argument against same-sex marriage was secondary to its argument against any violation of what it regarded as the natural order, from "artificial reproductive technology" to, once again, adoption. It was a sweeping broadside, and for every truism it contained — "adopted children...tell us they long for relationship with their biological parents" — it proffered a nugget of pseudo-scientific hysteria, such as the assurance that "pre-teen girls not living with their biological fathers get their menstrual periods earlier than girls who live with their fathers."

Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised by anything written in a pamphlet handed out at a conservative conference by volunteers for the National Organization for Marriage. But I have been surprised, over the last two days, to hear the language of the "77 Reasons" pamphlet recurring over and over in the arguments of those lined up in defense of "natural marriage," from demonstrators quoted by NPR on the courthouse steps ("The simple purpose of marriage is to link parents and children, and without that we're going to have social chaos") to the Times' redoubtable Ross Douthat ("the share of single-parent households is ultimately a less meaningful indicator of family solidity...than the share of children living in married households with both their biological parents"). The conservative movement that once minimized the difficulties of adoption because it provided an alternative to abortion is now both explicitly and implicitly denigrating adoption precisely because it provides an alternative to the perfect biological families said to have a patent on God's purpose. Adoption is not essential to same-sex marriage; it is, however, essential to many same-sex couples who wish to build families, and since families present all marriages with a built-in case for their own legitimacy, it is adoption, as well as same-sex marriage, that has come under attack.

Since my wife and I adopted our daughter, we've come to know many same-sex couples who are also adoptive parents, and it is exactly as proponents of "natural marriage" fear: it is their prowess as parents, rather than as pro-creators, that turns out to be persuasive. I have come to believe that they have the right to be married because I know that I have the right to be married, and I know that they are the same as me — because I know that I have more in common with gay adoptive parents than I do with straight biological ones. In my wife and in me, the self-evident biological purpose of procreation may be broken, but by God, we earn the right to be called parents because of the effort required to raise our child apart from the sacred biological bond...and so they, our friends engaged in the same effort, the same mighty and holy labor, earn the right to be called married. People wonder why public opinion regarding same-sex marriage has shifted so quickly; although I can only answer from my own experience, I can tell you that in my case my recognition of the right of same-sex couples to marry grew directly from the arguments mustered against it, because ultimately I realized they were also mustered against my wife, against me, and against the one person all the pro-marriage protestors and pamphleteers have pledged themselves to protect:

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